Ebook Free Duveen: A Life in Art
Presenting this book in soft file kind is truly enjoyable. Yeah, this book will certainly be presented in various method, as just what you wish to get currently. Even this is a soft file; you could take pleasure in exactly how the book will certainly influence you. By reviewing it, you can acquire not just the motivating book yet additionally the representative most current book collection. Well, what is guide? Duveen: A Life In Art, as one of one of the most popular publications in the world. So, you need to read it.
Duveen: A Life in Art
Ebook Free Duveen: A Life in Art
It's not surprising that you activities are, reviewing will be always required. It is not just to meet the responsibilities that you have to end up in due date time. Checking out will certainly urge your mind and thoughts. Of course, analysis will significantly create your experiences about everything. Reviewing Duveen: A Life In Art is likewise a means as one of the cumulative books that gives several benefits. The advantages are not only for you, however, for the other individuals with those meaningful advantages.
In investing the downtime, lots of people have different methods. But, to make the exact same one, reading the Duveen: A Life In Art can be done perfectly. Also it is in various time, you all could gain the features and benefits of guide to check out. It is sort of book with the particular subject to overcome the everyday problems. When you require kind of amusement, this book is additionally suitable sufficient.
Growing up from elementary to the grown-up, checking out publications will allow different needs to think. At some time, we require guide because of the job target date. However in various other time, you could read once again this Duveen: A Life In Art, for not only the task target date demand however also for anxious. So, is reading this book your fantastic anxious to review. When you have enough to seek for an additional publication that can not make you really feel pleased, you will always seek various other resources, won't you? This is why we come to you in order to help in locating the appropriate book.
After reading this book, you will actually recognize just how precisely the significance of reading publications as usual. Assume once more as what this Duveen: A Life In Art gives you brand-new lesson, the other publications with lots of themes and categories as well as million titles will certainly additionally give you exact same, or more than it. This is why, we always give just what you require and also exactly what you need to do. Several collections of the books from not only this nation, from abroad a nations in the world are supplied here. By giving very easy method to help you locating the books, hopefully, reviewing behavior will spread out quickly to other individuals, also.
Review
"By far the best account of Joseph Duveen's life in a biography that is rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written. [Meryle Secrest's] inquiries into early-twentieth-century collecting whet our appetite for a more general history of the art market in the first half of the twentieth century."-John Brewer, "The New York Review of Books "Detailed and fascinating."-Edmund Fawcett, "Los Angeles Times Book Review "Secrest paints an engrossing picture of the art-dealing world, fraught with intrigues, betrayals and lawsuits, to say nothing of fakes, forgeries, and misattributions...A fascinating story, well told."-"Publisher's Weekly "A new, accurate, evenhanded account of Duveen's glamorous career."-Michael Peppiatt, "New York Times Book Review
Read more
From the Inside Flap
Meryle Secrest, biographer of Kenneth Clark ("Riveting . . . enthralling" -"Wall Street Journal) and Bernard Berenson ("A remarkable tour de force"-Sir Harold Acton), brings all her exceptional gifts to the story of Lord Duveen of Millbank. Her book is the first major biography in more than fifty years of the supreme international art dealer of the twentieth century and the first to make use of the enormous Duveen archive that spans a century and has, until recently, been kept under lock and key at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The story begins with Duveen pere, a Dutch Jew immigrating to Britain in 1866, establishing a business in London, going from humble beginnings in an antiques shop to a knighthood celebrating him as one of the country's leading art dealers. Duveen pere could discern an Old Master beneath layers of discolored varnish. He perfected the chase, the subterfuges, the strategies, the double dealings. He had an uncanny ability to spot a hidden treasure. It was called "the Duveen eye." His son, Joseph, grew up with it and learned it all-and more . . . Secrest tells us how the young Duveen was motivated from the beginning by the thrill of discovery; how he ascended, at twenty-nine, to (de facto) head of the business; how he moved away from the firm's emphasis on tapestries and Chinese porcelains toward the more speculative, more lucrative, more exciting business of dealing in Old Masters. We see a demand for these paintings growing in America, fueled by the new "squillionaires" just at the moment when British aristocrats with great art collections were losing their fortunes . . . how Duveen's whole career was based on the simple observation: Europe has the art; America, the money. Secrest shows how he sold hundreds of masterpieces by Bellini, Botticelli, Giotto, Raphael, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Watteau, Velazquez, Vermeer, and Titian, among others, by convincing such self-made Americans as Morgan, Frick, Huntington, Widener, Bache, Mellon, and Kress that ownership of great art would ennoble them, and while waving such huge sums at the already noble British owners that the art changed hands and all were happy. We discover Duveen's connection to Buckingham Palace: how when the Prince of Wales became Edward VII his first act was to call in Duveen Brothers as decorators (something had to be done with the lugubrious Victorian decor and ghastly tartan hangings); how Duveen supplied the tapestries and rugs for the coronation ceremonies in Westminster Abbey; and how, in 1933, he became Lord Duveen of Millbank. We learn about the controversies in which he became embroiled and about his legendary art espionage (a network of hotel employees spied on his clients to discover their tastes). Duveen was as generous as he was acquisitive, giving away hundreds of thousands of pounds to British institutions (the Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum-including rooms to house the Elgin Marbles), organizing exhibitions for young artists, writing books about British art, and playing a major role in the design of the National Gallery in Washington. Meryle Secrest's "Duveen fascinates as it contributes to our understanding of art as commerce and our grasp of American and English taste in the grand manner. As Andrew Mellon once said, paintings never looked as good as they did when Duveen was standing in front of them.
Read more
See all Editorial Reviews
Product details
Paperback: 540 pages
Publisher: University of Chicago Press; First Edition (US) First Printing edition (November 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0226744159
ISBN-13: 978-0226744155
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 1.4 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.1 out of 5 stars
14 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#682,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Amazon synopsis, the Booklist review, and comments from other readers tell you all you need to know about the book.No matter how good the writing it, the "book" has to have the right feel, the right paper, the right font, the right heft -- and I would not have bought this book after seeing it at the Norton Simon museum last summer if it did not have the right feel. It is really a nice book.I don't read many biographies of art dealers, but I visit a lot of art museums, and I read a lot of biographies. For a biography on art dealers I was surprised how enjoyable the story of the Duveen family was. Incredibly interesting.I'm two-thirds of the way through -- I bought the book mostly to see the story behind the Duveens and Norton Simon and am so enjoying the book, I have no desire to get through the book quickly. It appears the first third of the book was on the Duveen family history and how they rose to the top; the middle third is full of interesting anecdotes about individual pieces of art, buyers, sellers, museums, etc.; and, I assume, the third section will be the epilogue, how the Duveens dissolved, literally and figuratively.The family chart at the front of the book was indispensable. Looks like a snapshot of British royalty.The four or five pages on the history of Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy" is perhaps the highlight of the book. But then the very next section on "Pinkie" was just as good.The book includes almost 100 pages (96 pages to be exact) of the Duveen catalogue, between 1900 - 1939 ("a partial list") which includes the provenance for each piece of art. This alone is worth getting the book.The book also has 25 pages of notes which were not particularly remarkable for readers like me; it mostly provided the author a place to confirm her sources. I love it when authors use end notes to expand a bit on how they discovered something but it was not the case in this book (perhaps the only negative thing I could find about the book).The relationship between the Duveens and the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum in Boston was another high point of the book.I think a reader could easily skip around the book, reading the parts that most interest any particular reader.
DuveenA Life of ScamI thought I would enjoy reading about the Duveen dynasty far more than I did.This tale essentially turned out to be a story about a family that clawed its way to what it thought was the top of art, money and society. While the Duveens may have been the best at squeezing profits from heretofore undervalued works of art; it is interesting to learn how they turned art into a significant "market place" for their personal profit and gain. Unfortunately, not once in the entire book does one have the sense that any Duveen understood the meaning of the phrase "art for art's sake". Art for this family was simply a device for self aggrandizement and personal enrichment. Family relations meant nothing; as the smallest porcelain vase could pit one member against the other in a rage of avarice. As the story unfolded, it was clear this was a profile of a family bound together more by greed, jealousy and betrayal than personal loyalty or familial bonds. The glory of genuine art was lost on them, and while these Duveens traded "art" in the marketplace with passion; one soon guesses they could have been selling mattresses or tires with the same passion given similar profit. It does not take much reading to realize that almost every Duveen transaction was based on trickery or some form of deceit or swindle; all with the intent of personal enrichment. It seems the Duveen cabal possessed through the generations a certain vulgar greed that in my opinion tainted whatever passed through their smarmy hands.The fact that the author crafted the book in such a confusing manner of presentation did not help to make this an enjoyable read. It is curious to me how Meryle Secrest was so blinded by all of the "big art"; yet totally missed the obviously less than aesthetic side of the Duveens. Ms. Secrest simply ignores their total lack of integrity or character in all types of transactions. She also shows little to no insight for the strange one dimensional relationships within the Duveen family, specifically that of Joseph and his curiously lifeless wife. How could Secrest overlook the evidence that nothing seemed to animate any of them other than making huge profits by deceiving a client, besting another dealer or cheating an auction house?I confess that their shameless trickery bordering on fraud became so offensively predictable, and, the inner relationships of the Duveens so loathsome that I was reduced to skimming many chapters of this book; as, I figured I was the better for not knowing every aspect of their dirty business. Despite Ms. Secrest's attempt to legitimatize her subjects, one best summarizes this family, including Duveen himself, as nothing but a sore spot upon the world of art.
Secrest has given the would-be student of the life and motives of one of the most important figures of the twentieth century a sure means of understanding his ideals and methods. He is best known among scholars and students of art and culture as the main acquaintance of Bernhard Berenson; however, unlike Berenson Duveen made no assertions or pretensions about matters of the fine arts and did not compromise his integrity over the attributions of the objects he dealt in. As with Gimpel, Duveen knew that Berenson was a tiger in human clothing, ready to prey on his clients in the burgeoning art market of the United States. In terms of integrity and likability, Duveen's case is stronger that Berenson's.
Duveen: A Life in Art PDF
Duveen: A Life in Art EPub
Duveen: A Life in Art Doc
Duveen: A Life in Art iBooks
Duveen: A Life in Art rtf
Duveen: A Life in Art Mobipocket
Duveen: A Life in Art Kindle
